The city designed by students from Berlin Jr.-Sr. High School featured a lamp-shaped water tower with a café on top.
		A student from the Holy Spirit School in East Greenbush explains the vision behind “Arquebia,” the city design that won third place in Saturday’s competition.
		Solar-powered buildings and a monorail that runs on magnetic levitation were the highlights of the Ticonderoga Middle School team’s future city.

Students from across the Capital Region participated Jan. 14 in the 14th annual National Engineers Week Future City Competition, sponsored in part by and hosted at Rensselaer. The event introduces middle school students to engineering through practical applications of math and science and hands-on work with engineers. Nineteen teams of students in the seventh or eighth grades — assisted by a teacher and an engineer mentor — designed cities of the future on a computer, and then used a blueprint to build a model of a city section.

The teams defended their city design to a group of judges at Saturday’s event. Guilderland’s Farnsworth Middle School won the regional competition, and team members will travel to Washington, D.C., for the finals competition during National Engineers Week, Feb. 19-25.

Photos by RPI/Jason Gorss

Published January 16, 2006